GERMINATIONS: Plants know what it takes to survive

By Peter Coppola

Friday

Jun 1, 2018 at 6:50 AM

I was attending a plant sale and overheard a young gardener say this was his third season and he now knows what he has been doing wrong. I was impressed; I’ve been gardening for over 40 years and still make mistakes.

Plants have been growing, evolving and thriving on planet Earth for 1.7 billion years. I’ll spell that out -- 1,700,000,000.

Think about that; they have survived at least five continental shifts, a half-dozen ice ages, volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes that blackened the sky for years and killed life forms.

Five of these disasters initiated mass extinctions, each resulting in more than 70 percent of the planet’s species going extinct. It is estimated that 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet have gone extinct as a result of those disasters. And yet the plants are still here. By comparison, modern humans -- Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon and Homosapien (that’s us) -- have been around for 200,000 years, hunter-gatherers for 190,000 and farmers for 10,000 years.

To put that in perspective, if you call the width of your kitchen table 1.7 billion years, then 200,000 years would be the thickness of a piece of paper stuck to the edge of the table. Call me crazy, but I have to believe that plants know a lot more about survival than we ever will. Plants are the gold standard for Darwin’s theory of biological evolution; all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive and reproduce. Survival of the species; that is what it is all about.

The 30 percent of plant species that survived a mass extinction were the stronger, hardier, healthier plants. Over time, they developed physical and chemical defense systems. Thorns behind the leaves on plants like the barberry bush, spikes on a Russian olive tree, alkaloids in green apples and peppers, oily resins on poison ivy, oak and sumac -- all developed without human involvement.

Even when our nomadic ancestors decided to settle down and farm they worked with the plants, sowing at the proper time, fertilizing with animal manures, hoeing and weeding by hand and saving seed from the plants that produced higher yields and better-tasting food.

Then about 200 years ago, we decided to become smarter than plants. We performed experiments varying soil elements and pH then measuring the impact on growth and food production. We turned the process of saving seed-based on observation into a science called hybridizing. We identified the chemical makeup of their poisons and when we knew those secrets we decided that we could synthetically recreate fertilizers and pesticides.

We analyzed plants and experimented with their extracts in pursuit of healthier plants and to prevent pest problems, but at the same time we reduced their ability to protect themselves. Now we have a generation of weeds that are immune to pesticides and plants that have to be modified for resistance to new more powerful pesticides. Hello world, leave the plants alone they are starting to get mad at us and I don’t like our odds.

Peter Coppola is a master gardener and Wicked Local contributor. He lectures on request and can be reached at mastergardener@rcn.com.